this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2026
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Microblog Memes

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A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.

Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.

RULES:

  1. Your post must be a screen capture of a microblog-type post that includes the UI of the site it came from, preferably also including the avatar and username of the original poster. Including relevant comments made to the original post is encouraged.
  2. Your post, included comments, or your title/comment should include some kind of commentary or remark on the subject of the screen capture. Your title must include at least one word relevant to your post.
  3. You are encouraged to provide a link back to the source of your screen capture in the body of your post.
  4. Current politics and news are allowed, but discouraged. There MUST be some kind of human commentary/reaction included (either by the original poster or you). Just news articles or headlines will be deleted.
  5. Doctored posts/images and AI are allowed, but discouraged. You MUST indicate this in your post (even if you didn't originally know). If a post is found to be fabricated or edited in any way and it is not properly labeled, it will be deleted.
  6. Be nice. Take political debates to the appropriate communities. Take personal disagreements to private messages.
  7. No advertising, brand promotion, or guerrilla marketing.

Related communities:

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[–] bytesonbike@discuss.online 144 points 21 hours ago (8 children)

I work in this space and I'm appalled at how much targeted ads make my company.

Every smart person I know is using adblocking too. So is there's like a percentage of people who eats ads all day and open their wallets up?

[–] djdarren@piefed.social 6 points 6 hours ago

Ads Georg, who lives in a cave and looks at adverts 17.7 billion times a day is an outlier and should not be counted.

[–] hesh@quokk.au 130 points 21 hours ago (3 children)

Yes, most people. Adblockers are used by a minority.

[–] Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 12 hours ago

It's not actually most. It's just enough to cover the ad spend.

Someone needs to create malware that installs ad blockers. That will more than half their conversion rate.

[–] SmackemWittadic@lemmy.world 36 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

An unfortunate truth.

Some people justify it by stating that they keep ads because they want to support the websites, but don't know that at the very least they should be blocking trackers and 3rd party cookies

[–] Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world 13 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

they want to support the websites

Are these people actually clicking on the ads and making purchases through them? Because if all they’re doing is letting the ads clutter space, but not interacting with them, does that really support the site at all?

Someone on here some weeks ago had a beef with me saying I skip passed promo content in YouTube videos. They said something about wanting to support the videomakers. K, but if I’m not in the market for a new mattress (as an example of an ad I sometimes hear), it doesn’t make sense for me to listen to the sponsored mattress read-through. If I don’t make a purchase with the YouTuber’s promo code, then what’s the difference if I skip a couple minutes ahead? Do I owe a video “respect” by listening anyway? And if for some reason the advertiser cares more about me listening to their spiel than about me actually making a purchase, well, that’s silly and sucks for them.

There are some things advertised that I’m never going to buy no matter how much they’re shown to me. Meal kits, gambling sites, men’s boxers, these are all things I’ve seen countless sponsored ad placements mid-video for, and they are all things I don’t use and can’t see myself using. Yet the ads persist.

So I will continue skipping.

[–] AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social 8 points 10 hours ago

Are these people actually clicking on the ads and making purchases through them? Because if all they’re doing is letting the ads clutter space, but not interacting with them, does that really support the site at all?

For the most part, no, it doesn't support the site, since most Google ads are PPC (Pay-Per-Click).

[–] Rolder@reddthat.com 18 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Even then the proper way to do that would be to Adblock and then whitelist sites you support and know don’t have turbo intrusive ads

[–] SmackemWittadic@lemmy.world 5 points 9 hours ago

Yeah that's what I do, but if they don't know about adblock, they're not gonna know about that.

Same thing on every other creative platform. People don't know that it's much better off for the creators to receive support in buying merch or patreon than it is for them to get a small fraction of what YouTube makes in ad revenue

[–] TheBat@lemmy.world 6 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Most people access 'the web' via phone apps. There's no adblocker for those.

[–] papalonian@lemmy.world 8 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

There's plenty, with a bit of doing. Definitely not as easy as installing ublock through a browser extension store but very doable

[–] TheBat@lemmy.world 3 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

On iPhone? And on android without rooting?

[–] Fiery@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Firefox on android can just install extensions. No clue about the iphone. I remember some chromium browsers also having extensions on Android but I'm not 100% sure which ones.

There's also DNS blocking of ads which can be set in your DNS settings or be part of your VPN connection. This will effectively block all ads too (even embedded ones in apps). On android ofc, yet again no clue about apple.

[–] ParadoxSeahorse@lemmy.world 3 points 1 hour ago

On iOS it’s the same, extensions for browser or DNS for apps

[–] EvilFonzy@lemmy.world 52 points 20 hours ago (3 children)

They absolutely are. Everything I got from my family this past Christmas was slop from the TikTok shop. They just clicked the fist ad they saw and bought whatever. I even got two of the same item because my brother didn't realize he clicked two ads for the same thing. I've been calling it Dropshipmas.

[–] thethunderwolf@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 minute ago

💀

"compliant consumer" is a mental illness

[–] bytesonbike@discuss.online 14 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Oh shit I forgot all about this! After the holidays, everyone in the office was talking about all the garbage they got, and most of them were talking about how many sales/deals they got off of Tiktok.

[–] ParadoxSeahorse@lemmy.world 2 points 1 hour ago

Garbage in garbage out

[–] Eheran@lemmy.world 14 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

How did you find out? Did you talk about it?

[–] EvilFonzy@lemmy.world 17 points 19 hours ago

They were pretty happy to volunteer the info. He still gave me the duplicate!

[–] Fizz@lemmy.nz 18 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

I showed my sister ad block and she was like why would i want to block ads. She said she has her algo dialed in and the ads just show her products she probably wants to buy.

[–] thethunderwolf@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 41 seconds ago

as i have commented on another thing:

💀

“compliant consumer” is a mental illness

[–] Tiger@sh.itjust.works 21 points 16 hours ago

That hurts my brain to hear, oh my!

[–] WanderingThoughts@europe.pub 13 points 18 hours ago

There are enough stories about somebody installing a pi-hole and a family member getting angry because now the ads for all the pretty things are gone.

[–] otter@lemmy.dbzer0.com 23 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (1 children)

You think that's an obscene amount of money? The intermediary services that collect, collate, aggregate, etc. that same data in the first place before selling it to companies like your employer? That's where the insane money is. That's the long game. 🤢🥲

[–] peopleproblems@lemmy.world 10 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Middlemen make the most money of any profession.

Market Makers. Insurance. Everyone involved in the mortgage world. Research publications. Mid-level managers.

[–] couch1potato@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

I'm a mid-level manager. I do make a good amount of money.

[–] otter@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 18 hours ago

Was about to comment similarly 🤪

[–] ideonek@piefed.social 4 points 17 hours ago

I'm going to push back on this. The experiments that had scientific rigor shown that broad ads were only marginally less effective then personalized ones while being way cheeper.

A lot of what you see may be attributing conversion to sales that would happen anyway. Classic examples would be do you use branded search keyowords? Off course you do, despite the body of evidence that it only cannibalize the organic search.

But there are other much more complex mehanics in play. Each sestem takes away more and more control to replace it with "autootymization", so you truly have no idea to whom and when your ads is shown. Exact keywords are broader then broad "back in a day". Who knows how google is mixing your ad components, an now AI will dynamically change the ad content and placement using unknown criteria. All this to obscure that what we do is advertisal (?) equivalent showing a pizza ad to people who finished giving their order to the waiter.

Measurable online was here to save us from ineffective offline. Big data was here to save us from innefectove CPC. Algorithms were here to save us from paralism of to much data and now AI is here to save us from all this producing mostly a negative ROI anyway.

I honestly belive we were in the middle of a massive online advertising bubble, that we manage to cover up with even bigger AI bubble.

We are fucked.

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 4 points 19 hours ago

I work in this space and I'm appalled at how much targeted ads make my company.

And here is the hint (with the fencepost) that it might be more wishful thinking on the customers side (the companies renting the service). Similiar to the AI slop bubble.